“Gerni the car, the driveway, the house?” What do you call the act of using your water blaster as you clean outdoor furniture, roofs, boats and all the other wonderful uses for them? What about the water blaster machine itself?
It is common here in Australia for people to use the term “Gerni.” We hear it many times a day, so thought a look into this would be interesting for us all.
When you say you’re here to pick up your ‘Gerni’ we might look at you strangely, share our thoughts about it actually being a ‘water blaster’ or a ‘pressure washer/cleaner’ then smile and go to work finding out what brand of machine you really have!
Gerni themselves say “unless it’s green, it’s not a REAL Gerni”
We do not use or recommend their “green” water blasters here.
So then the game begins to find out what actual brand they have!
When we are onboarding a new employee, the first thing they learn is they are #notagernie 🙂 It is heartwarming to see that new employee sharing this with the customers, once it becomes their new normal too.
Many of us don’t even realise that a common word we use may have originated from a brand. Apparently this is called gentrification.
Some brands have benefited from this, others have lost court cases over the use of it, do not have trade marks anymore, or had to create their own campaigns to re brand the word back to them!
Here are a few examples you may be familiar with, or perhaps use yourself:
- Gerni – water blaster/pressure washer/pressure cleaner and the act of using it
- Band-aid – adhesive device later they added “Band-Aid brand”
- Eski – cooler
- Stanley Blades- Trimmer/utility knife
- Texta – felt pens
- Glad wrap – cling wrap
- Hills hoist – clothesline
- Elevator & escalator – automatic lifters
- Zipper – fastener
- Kleenex – tissues
- Hoover – vacuum cleaner
- Taser – electro shock device
- Aspirin – pain relief medication
- Xerox – copy print
- -They later created an ad: “When you use ‘Xerox’ the way you use ‘aspirin,’ we get a headache.”
…so we created a campaign #notagerni
Contact us today for all your water blasting needs…. and smile when your hear others using this too, and help us to educate the world… #notagerni 🙂 it’s a water blaster!
Call Terry Van Zon for FREE quote 0438 540 408 Email: custom@waterblasters.com.au
By following us on Facebook Instagram and LinkedIn you can also see more pictures and updates as we custom build machines for our clients, do cleanups around the home, and new arrivals at the showroom.
